This is actually the tip of the iceberg (with penguins standing on top of it, of course). The documents that have been around for a long time have also undergone significant improvements and have been updated every time new versions with interesting features were released. We are doing our best to keep our training sessions up to date, and this keeps us pretty busy! So, if you haven’t had a look at these documents for a while, you will probably learn new things if you open them again.

Why so many documents at once? Well, we usually try to release the new documents that we create as early as possible. Here are a few excuses for doing this late this time:

We’ve had a very busy year (new training sessions, development and service work), preventing us from polishing our new documents and creating new pages describing them.

The switch to our new website took more time than expected. We were reluctant to add more pages that would have caused more migration work, and we were also busy deploying the KVM virtualization technology on our new server.

We are also switching the documents to a new template, which leaves more space for real content and less space for logos and for information repeated on every page. This work is far from being over yet!

We couldn’t release them for National Security reasons .

Now that there’s no infrastructure work left, and that we have run out of excuses (except the one about being busy, we still are), we should be able to release our new documents much earlier.

Free seats to community contributors in our public embedded Linux training sessions

At Free Electrons, we owe a lot to the Free Software community, and we’re doing our best to give back as much as we can.

For each of our public embedded Linux training sessions, we decided to offer a free seat to a deserving contributor to the community, with a commercial value of 1750 € (including materials, lunch and laptop rental).

Free Electrons is proud to release a new set of training slides from its embedded Linux training materials. These new ones cover writing USB device drivers for Linux.

Like everything we create, these new materials are released to the user and developer community under a free license. They can be freely downloaded, copied, distributed or even modified according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

Some of training labs now use the SkyEye emulator, which supports several arm boards. People can now practise with cross-compiling and booting the Linux kernel without having to purchase expensive development boards.

KernelKit, a live GNU/Linux distribution derived from Knoppix, was created for embedded systems and kernel developers. In particular, it includes uClibc cross-compiling toolchains for several platforms: arm, armeb, i386, m68k, mips, mipsel, ppc and sh4. KernelKit is used in our training labs.

The PDF versions of the documents now include internal and external hyperlinks, thanks to using OpenOffice.org 2.0. To navigate within the documents or to go to an external site, just click on the links in your favorite PDF reader.

Some utilities were created and shared with the community: clink (to compact cross-compiling toolchains), and cOOol (to report broken hyperlinks in OpenOffice.org documents).

The training materials were used for 12 training sessions delivered to embedded system companies and key silicon vendors.